Friday, December 9, 2011

In praise of: The Literary Review

In the September issue of the Literary
Review (the issue currently available here in New Zealand) Joan
Smith considers Robert Levine’s Free
Ride: How the internet is destroying the culture business and how the culture
business can fight back. The Businesweek review of the book is here,
here
is the Guardian and here
is the New York Times. See what I did
there? Illustrated the book’s theme, that people on the internet steal content.

The book sounds like a good, thoughtful
discussion of the issues. Near the end of her review Smith writes that Levine
is:

right to argue for a “content tax” –
effectively collectively licensing – that would allow media companies to
collect revenue in a system modelled on one that allows music companies to
collect for radio play.

She would say that, wouldn’t she: she is on
the board of ALCS,
the Authors’ Licensing and Collecting Society which is the UK equivalent of New
Zealand’s CLL, Copyright Licensing
Limited (disclosure: I am on its board) which does the same job of licensing
the use of copyright works. Digitisation is a huge issue for all such rights
organisations – it was relatively easy to manage photocopying in schools and
libraries but e-books open up a whole new Pandora’s box of digital worms.

Smith continues:

But I’d have liked to have seen him address
one of the most peculiar effects of the Internet, which has been to suspend the
moral obligations that consiumers observe in their offline behaviour. I’m not
aware of instances where shoppers who insist on “free content” via the Internet
put the same principle into practice in Tesco’s, clearing the shelves and
refusing to pay on the way out. Why some people feel it’s OK to expect
something for nothing when they consume online, but not in shops, is a
fascinating area for research.

Seems clear enough to me: people feel
anonymous online, just as looters do in a riot. Which is why people who would
never steal from a bookshop will happily download from Pirate Bay.

On the next page John
Sweeney (“There are three rules in journalism. First, find a crocodile.
Two, poke it in the eye with a stick. Three, stand back and report what happens
next”) reviews DarkMarket: Cyberthieves,
cybercops and you by Misha Glenny, which is about the hackers who steal
credit-card data, and along the way shows that England is just as two-degrees
of separation as New Zealand is:

The Nigerian, Adewale Taiwo, got four years
but served less than two. He was threatened with confiscation proceedings for
his ill-gotten gains of some £350,000. At the hearings the prosecutor mislaid a
key file, and the judge, Graham Robinson – he pinched my girlfriend one billion
years ago, but that’s another story – got fed up and declared the amount
swindled to be just £53,000. Taiwo preferred to spend a furtheryear in prison rather than hand over the
cash, but the prison authorities let him out anyway to deport him back to
Nigeria.

The magazine unfailingly reviews unpredictably
interesting books and matches them with predictably interesting reviewers. It
is, imho, best in class.